Select Works, Section 452 (part 1)

Section 2 2. If the Intellectual-Principle were the engendering Source, then the engendered secondary, while less perfect than the Intellectual-Principle, would be close to it and similar to it: but since the engendering Source is above the Intellectual-Principle, the secondary can only be that principle. But why is the Intellectual-Principle not the generating source? Because [it is not a self-sufficing simplex]: the Act of the Intellectual-Principle is intellection, which means that, seeing the intellectual object towards which it has turned, it is consummated, so to speak, by that object, being in itself indeterminate like sight [a vague readiness for any and every vision] and determined by the intellectual object. This is why it has been said that "out of the indeterminate dyad and The One arise the Ideas and the numbers": for the dyad is the Intellectual-Principle. Thus it is not a simplex; it is manifold; it exhibits a certain composite quality- within the Intellectual or divine order, of course- as the principle that sees the manifold. It is, further, itself simultaneously object and agent of intellection and is on that count also a duality: and it possesses besides another object of intellection in the Order following upon itself. But how can the Intellectual-Principle be a product of the Intellectual Object? In this way: the intellectual object is self-gathered [self-compact] and is not deficient as the seeing and knowing principle must be- deficient, mean, as needing an object- it is therefore no unconscious thing: all its content and accompaniment are its possession; it is self-distinguishing throughout; it is the seat of life as of all things; it is, itself, that self-intellection which takes place in eternal repose, that is to say, in a mode other than that of the Intellectual-Principle. But if something comes to being within an entity which in no way looks outside itself- and especially within a being which is the sum of being- that entity must be the source of the new thing: stable in its own identity, it produces; but the product is that of an unchanged being: the producer is unchangeably the intellectual object, the product is produced as the Intellectual Act, an Act taking intellection of its source- the only object that exists for it- and so becoming Intellectual-Principle, that is to say, becoming another intellectual being, resembling its source, a reproduction and image of that. But how from amid perfect rest can an Act arise? There is in everything the Act of the Essence and the Act going out from the Essence: the first Act is the thing itself in its realized identity, the second Act is an inevitably following outgo from the first, an emanation distinct from the thing itself. Thus even in fire there is the warmth comported by its essential nature and there is the warmth going instantaneously outward from that characterizing heat by the fact that the fire, remaining unchangeably fire, utters the Act native to its essential reality. So it is in the divine also: or rather we have there the earlier form of the double act: the divine remains in its own unchanging being, but from its perfection and from the Act included in its nature there emanates the secondary or issuing Act which- as the output of a mighty power, the mightiest there is- attains to Real Being as second to that which stands above all Being. That transcendent was the potentiality of the All; this secondary is the All made actual. And if this is all things, that must be above and outside of all, so, must transcend real being.